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‪#‎ThisIsWhyWeNeedPolytheism‬, II

So this one time a bunch of really awesome contemporary Polytheists from across the continuum of such, from poets to scholars to devoted laity and professional clergy, started writing in a public way about their religions and theologies and it caught on and others joined in and then conferences started happening and the conversation was summoned up from the hidden places it had been hiding — for the sake of survival — for decades. And then from the middle of that conversation, which was life-saving for some people and brought people with renewed sense of hope and devotion to their gods with pious religious regard and a genuine hope for solidarity with others, came a bunch of weirdly political and socio-economic propositions which — while otherwise agreeable — asserted themselves as the defining characteristics of polytheistic religion. And then people who were having profound religious experiences with their gods and sought support and solidarity through online connections to help process these, while in states of extreme vulnerability, encountered instead of religious structures and foundations and guidance for how to proceed sanely, rather destabilizing political shouting and coercive suppositions which forced them to begin questioning some of the only structures in their lives the gods hadn’t already kicked out from under them. Courting suicides and foreclosures and entirely lost in the seas of life — but no longer for the reasons that led them to their gods and to their purposes and to devotional solidarity — they found themselves shifted further from, rather than more solidly in, their relationships to their gods.